Archive for the ‘Wolf Eyes’ Category

My man Simon Doling just linked this for my attention. I was trying to write a comment underneath but my thoughts spiralled a bit too far. First off I started thinking about just how cool a clip it was, and what a cool and brave thing Lydon does here, and how it feels like he’s somehow mashing the future together with the past to tell the present to hurry up, whilst similtaneously burying other pasts, the ex-Johnny Rotten in a white suit getting black kids to dance to that funky, dubby bass. How he somehow got to play Doctor Who twice by being a poster-boy for punk and for post-punk. All the stuff you know or should know about the story of Johnny Rotten. All the stuff that kind of makes it a shame that he’s always been a tosser who now sells butter. Then I started thinking about the impossibility of something like the two worlds in the clip ever meeting in this day and age, some modern equivalent of the harsh, dirgey doom disco with Lydon’s discomforting warble of a dead, bored soul car-crashing into the wholesome generic teen TV rave-up show complete with cluelessly bland, cheesy shithead older-dude presenter, and I found myself grateful once again for the YouTube miracle. The miracle that happens over and over whenever someone sends you one of these links, or whenever your stoned fingers manage to type in “Can” or “The Monks” or “Funkadelic” or whatever. I felt grateful that I live in an age where these lost cultural antiquities of the past can suddenly be manifested for my private asessment, enjoyment or education at the touch of some buttons. It also gives me pleasure to think that those artists who did that cool thing once in a certain place at a certain time will eventually get their kudos from a wider audience, because that feels righteous. It nourishes the thing inside me that often feels like a bitter lie, the idea that you hold onto the faith, you keep your dreams. Furthermore it should engender a sense that, as long as that all-important recording is made (and not lost), it is worth doing that thing you do, and getting that jam tight, that joke right, that little step to the left… right.
But then, because, like any decent object of aesthetic appreciation, this YouTube clip of Public Image Ltd performing in the Spring of the first year of a new decade of what would become 1980s America, has, of course, a multiplicity of possible meanings and interpretations, and I started to think about it in another way. Because, in a sense, both of the worlds are now as dead and gone as each other. That door we see John Lydon kicking in has gone, and so has John himself. They cancelled each other out. That show would never happen any more. John’s a celebrity, get him out of here. But… I’m floundering here. I guess I’m trying to say that that piece of footage, fittingly for Lydon’s oeuvre, contains the seeds of its own demise. Lydon senses the stillborn thing that the show’s format will produce – a mimed performance to a seated audience, and lays waste to it in a classic act of creative destruction. Good old Johnny, he always wants to destroy. A great moment, very cool, captured forever on YouTube, possibly. But, and there are many reasons for this, that moment will never happen again. Shit, if I was getting paid for this instead of sciatica or whatever it is that’s making my right leg hurt like hell then I’d bother to get this right, or buy another chair or something. But yeah, every time that clip is seen it makes the possibility of the kind of sabotage or detournement or sheer spontaneous fuck-youness of the type John Lydon gets away with a little bit less likely, partly because they wouldn’t let you get away with it, and partly because it’s so been done. I mean, people can and probably will try and do that type of thing, but they’ll probably have something like this in mind, and, even if other people write about it like it meant something and still more fools believe them, it didn’t. Those worlds are mutually exclusive now, and it doesn’t matter if you’re holding up a banner in the American Idol audience or punching your fist in the air at a Wolf Eyes gig. Those days are over.
Hmm, that kind of unravels as it goes along doesn’t it?

Sometimes people seem so eager to be influenced by one another in the music-making community that I’m surprised they haven’t got white wool growing out of their heads. Somewhere I’ve got some video footage of me standing on Cornish moorland ranting about how everyone’s into Noise, or Free Folk, and musicians are falling over themselves to try and incoporate aspects of these genres into their work. The Noise thing is particularly interesting, because here is a type of music that should resist all but the most determined connosieur of wrongness, and yet Wolf Eyes et al are underground superstars. I saw the band live a while ago, and they were really good – much more ROCK than I thought they would be in terms of rhythmic flow and riffage. I also own some of their records and I find them quite interesting for their openess to sonic possibilities. On the other hand I’m annoyed by Wolf Eyes because there’s something kind of fucked up about the way their cultural product is consumed. It just isn’t right that some skinny kid in a cap at a gig can find genuine aesthetic reward in the spectacle of a middle-aged American in a black T-Shirt and long hair twisting an oscillator and punching the air with a beercan. These are the reasons why:

Japanese folk, amongst others, have been doing this for ages. Why do white Americans make it “cool” and get paid?
It’s great to see people expanding their horizons but there is a danger that if you take something that is meant to have an inherently repellant quality to it and turn it into some beer-swilling machismo rockfest to bang your head to then you have robbed it of something.
I will now contradict that by questioning why a “free” music shouldn’t stumble across a tune once in a while, or simply a tone that doesn’t sound unpleasant? Will people think they are gay, or have sold out? These bands seem to have gone up a bit of a stylistic cul-de-sac to me. Why do the drums have to be this sludgy thud, the riffs doomy, the electronics so squealy? Why is the imagery of the titles so cartoonishly bleak? Leper War? Stabbed In The Face?
Are these guys consciously or unconsciously providing the soundtrack to American foreign policy? Should they be?

I dunno, I’m a bit confused about my take on the whole thing. The problem is that making extreme music isn’t actually the hardest job in the world. A lot of what I do is basically taking random noises and trying to make them sound evocative in some way, and evoking pain, dread and violence doesn’t really do it for me. I guess I’m a bit better at “sad”, “regretful” and “confused”. I mean, if you had told me 5 years ago that Boomkat would sell out of the latest primitive free electronics sludgecore title in next to no time I would have thought I’d have died and gone to heaven, but I feel like I ordered the wrong revolution. I guess I was waiting for something a bit more like KEMIALLISET YSTAVAT, but I can’t even get into that. It sounds too clever, too mannered.

You see, me and Dave rail against this kind of thing because we unceasingly demand total PURITY and we usually end up rattling. We make up bands with names like Floorpedal (3 or 4 boys crouching over pedals onstage) and Noise Eyes (see above) and we talk about picking fights on the net. I was going to make a Noise Eyes MySpace page but I’ve got too much MySpace action already, and yet I wanted to upload some of the music that I’ve made lately on the TEAC reel to reel. It’s more or less all loops of MPC and OSCar, filtered, FX’d and pitched, plus multiple layers of backwardsness. Some of it is a little chewy, but some of it sounds quite nice, if you get me? I’ve been trying to upload it to Esnips all morning, because for ages everytime a file uploaded I would get an error message saying “Upload denied. Suspected copyright infringement” Jesus fucking Christ. Anyway, this is what I’m on about. I’m hoping you might like it because some of it sounds a bit sub-Wolf Eyes.